Oscar R. Window |
Valladolid (EFE).- The electoral results of 23J in Castilla y León, with a PP that has reaped seats at the expense of the ‘sowing’ of Vox, but also the impossibility of both parties to form a government at the national level open an unexpected scenario for both, destined to continue with the understanding in the PP-Vox coalition that they have in the autonomous government, but with less certainty.
The PP of President Alfonso Fernández Mañueco has added up to 18 the five seats that Vox has lost in Castilla y León with appeals to the useful vote and the party of Vice President Juan García-Gallardo has already blamed the popular ones for weakening precisely with that speech the options to coalesce at the national level, while the PSOE has maintained its 12 deputies and improved in votes even the results of 2019 and the regional elections of 2022.
1.- The temptation
A quick reading of the distribution of seats on election day yields a notable loss of support for Vox in Castilla y León, remaining with only one representative. The temptation of a new electoral advance in the Community with the endorsement of this result may have more to do with the disputes that can be fueled between PP and Vox due to what happens between the two at the national level and other autonomies than with taking advantage of the weakening.
In fact, a more in-depth analysis of the results indicates that the loss of support in Vox has not had to do so much with the decrease in votes (-35,000 compared to 2019) as with the increase in the PP (+150,000), in a trend similar to the comparison with the results of the 2022 regional elections.
Specifically, the PP has achieved ten percentage points more than the vote in comparison with both elections, but has increased the number of votes it adds to 206,000 compared to February of last year, while Vox has left 4 percentage points and 20,000 votes compared to the regional ones, maintaining a support that is close to 200,000 supports, which would give them a similar number of seats in some hypothetical regional governments. 13 current.
2.- Manueco is supported
Since the same election night, Mañueco has pulled from the manual by assuring in the same sentence that “this victory is new support for the PP’s policies and new support for the Government of Castilla y León”, without alluding to the coalition he maintains with Vox, but with an ambivalence that may be worth it to buy time and wait for events at the national level between both parties.
In the PP of Castilla y León they are aware that the party has before it the need to present its national leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo as presidential candidate, but they also assume that the numbers are not enough to achieve that investiture, so they must clarify what their relationship with Vox is, after months and weeks in which they have alternated agreements and clashes on behalf of the municipal and regional coalitions after 28M.
3.- The PSOE resists
In this equation about the future of the coalition in Castilla y León, what is happening with the PSOE also interferes, which has managed to maintain the seats it had since 2019 (12) and improve its results in votes, but which at the regional level has yet to define the path it takes to undertake the next regional electoral cycle.
Despite the fact that it may still be a long way off (2.5 years maximum) the PSOE of Castilla y León must decide whether its leader Luis Tudanca should run again as a candidate for those future elections, whenever they are, or the party opts for a change, which the PP can take advantage of to take it into account in order to manage the time of the legislature.
4.- The 105,000 ‘orphans’ of Cs
In a campaign marked by appeals to the useful vote, both by the PP and the PSOE, which has generated discomfort in Vox, a government partner of the popular in Castilla y León, the transfer of votes within the right and left blocks has been relative, but that dispute between the government partners remains latent.
However, the PP may have benefited from the non-competition of Ciudadanos in these elections, since in the 2019 general elections the oranges obtained 105,000 votes (without translating them into any seats) and in the regional elections just a year and a half ago almost 55,000 votes, which will now have sought other electoral ‘refuges’.
In the case of the left, with the difficulty of comparing the results obtained by the new Sumar formation with those achieved by Unidas Podemos four years ago, it does seem to have operated a transfer because the PSOE has added some 20,000 votes compared to 2019, almost the difference between the 130,000 votes achieved by Unidas Podemos in the previous ones and the 100,000 of Sumar now in Castilla y León.
5.- The times
At Christmas 2021, Mañueco exercised his presidential power to manage the times in the legislature of the pandemic that he shared with Cs, he chose to break the regional government and advance the elections in pursuit of a sufficient majority to govern alone, which he failed to achieve and which led him to agree with Vox.
The remaining two and a half years of the legislature will be marked by this latency, by the evolution of the relations of the PP and Vox at the national level and by that control of the times that Mañueco has as president, waiting for what could happen with a possible political blockade in Spain that would lead to new elections on Christmas 2023. All this will be a matter of time. EFE